Officials Say Texas Inquiry Is Not Limited to White-Supremacist Gang

KAUFMAN, Tex. — Law enforcement officials investigating the fatal shootings of two prosecutors here have been pursuing a variety of leads, including prison interviews with members of a violent white-supremacist gang and an examination of cases worked on by both victims. But they remain no closer to linking the shootings to any particular suspects or motive.

On Tuesday, the Kaufman County district attorney’s office reopened for business on the second floor of the local courthouse, three days after the county’s top prosecutor, Mike McLelland, 63, and his wife, Cynthia, 65, were found shot to death in their home in Forney. The shootings came after another prosecutor, Mark E. Hasse, 57, was shot and killed on Jan. 31 in an employee parking lot in a still-unsolved case that one law enforcement official described as “cold.”

Investigators have been interviewing members of the prison gang known as the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, but officials said that they have found no evidence linking the killings to the gang and that they were viewing its potential involvement as one of a number of possibilities. They have also talked to a former justice of the peace who was sentenced last April to two years’ probation and fined $2,500 for stealing computer monitors from a county office in 2011. Mr. McLelland and Mr. Hasse were both involved in that case.

One of the man’s lawyers, David K. Sergi, said that his client had submitted to a gun residue test after Mr. Hasse’s killing and again on Saturday night after the shootings of the McLellands. He said that his client had nothing to do with either shooting, and he asked that the man’s name be withheld out of concern for his safety.

Officials were also looking into a Facebook posting from a person who said he was a county resident named Bob Miller, who wrote on Monday that the killings were “acts of revenge against the tyrannical, unjust, Pit Bull style treatment of every poor soul damned to do business in the Kaufman County courthouse.” He named another prosecutor in the office, and added that he expected that that person “will soon perish, bringing closure to an era of unacceptable practices and allowing Kaufman County residents to move forward with liberty and justice.”

Asked about the Facebook posting, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I., among the numerous local, state and federal agencies investigating the shootings, said she could not comment on specific leads.

Mr. Hasse and Mr. McLelland were killed after the state’s top law enforcement agency, the Department of Public Safety, issued a bulletin in December warning officials that the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas was planning to retaliate against law enforcement personnel involved in an investigation that struck a heavy blow to its leadership. Their deaths came less than a year after Mr. McLelland’s office prosecuted a case that led to a member of the gang, James Patrick Crawford, receiving two life sentences for his role in a 2011 shooting and kidnapping. Mr. Hasse was shot the day that two other members of the gang pleaded guilty to racketeering charges in Houston.

The investigation that led to the guilty pleas and prompted the law enforcement bulletin involved a multiagency task force that included Kaufman County prosecutors and three other district attorneys’ offices. The task force helped secure an indictment against nearly three dozen senior leaders and other members of the gang in federal court in Houston in October.

One of the federal prosecutors in Houston handling the case, Jay Hileman, the assistant United States attorney, is withdrawing because of security concerns, according to defense lawyers who were notified via e-mail of his decision.

A spokeswoman for Kenneth Magidson, the United States attorney for the Southern District of Texas, declined to confirm or deny Mr. Hileman’s departure. “The case currently pending in the Southern District of Texas has been and will continue to be worked by the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of Texas in partnership with the Department of Justice’s criminal division,” said the spokeswoman, Angela Dodge.

Mr. McLelland and his wife were found on Saturday. According to a search warrant issued by a local judge, relatives had talked to Mr. McLelland by phone Friday evening, but no one had contact with him or his wife after that. About 6:45 p.m. Saturday, after several failed attempts to contact the McLellands, family friends went to their house, discovered the bodies and contacted the authorities. Deputies found more than a dozen shell casings from a high-powered .223-caliber rifle near the bodies.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Officials Say Inquiry Into Deaths of Two Texas Prosecutors Is Not Limited to Gang. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe